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If you haven’t started working on it yet, stop what you’re doing and get on it. For most consumer-focused organizations, the end-of the-year holiday season is the most important opportunity to drive revenue. And year after year, email marketing is simply unbeatable when it comes to driving sales, earning donations or engaging with your audience.

As Bloomberg News reported last holiday season: “Even as retailers debate the efficacy of social-media marketing on Facebook and Twitter, they have no doubts about the power of a decades-old technology to drive sales. The killer app is called email.” As we noted this summer, email remains the most cost-effective digital marketing channel for driving sales.

Whether your holiday email strategy is all set or still under construction, we’ve got some tips for driving sales, conversions and engagement.

Four Holiday Email Strategy Tips

Segment By Behavior: The reason email marketing is so effective (see above) is because marketers can use all of email’s data and analytics to send more relevant campaigns to subscribers.

You can think of your holiday campaigns as an opportunity to understand what your subscribers want. Are they engaging with messages about a deep discount or are they paying attention to messages about a particular type of product? Do offer-centric subject lines earn the open or do your subscribers respond to more personal / emotional subject lines?

Use the answers to these questions to send your subscribers more of what they want and less of what they ignore. Build into your strategy times to review your metrics looking for segmentation opportunities.

Part of an effective strategy is paying attention to what is working and what isn’t. Be prepared to pivot if your data shows you that you should.

Create Personas and Target Them: For each campaign you intend to send this season, spend some time talking about who the ideal recipient is. That is, work out the types of people mostly likely to act on your messages. Get specific with these personas by combing through the things you already know about your customers. Think through relevant traits such as age range, income level and purchasing frequency.

So instead of creating generic content for your subscriber list, you can, for example, create messages designed to speak to moms looking for a last-minute tech gift for their children.

Personas can help you think through what motivates your audience. They can also help you challenge your own email marketing assumptions, such as the best time to send a campaign. For example, if you’re a jewelry retailer and you are trying to reach husbands looking for a gift idea, maybe your normal Tuesday afternoon sending time wouldn’t be as effective as first thing Monday morning when you know lots of workers are hunting online for gifts.

Keep Things to the Point: As we’ve seen this year, the crowded inbox is a real issue for marketers. And your organization is not the only one banking on the holiday season. Respect your subscribers’ time by sending easy-to-digest, to-the-point content.

Make smart use of images and sparing use of text to get your point across. Your campaign is not the only one in the inbox and you are competing for a slice of overburdened attention spans. Likewise, subject lines should earn the open because they accurately forecast what’s in your campaign. And we say this every year, but please spare your subscribers from the trite and ubiquitous “Tis the Season” constructions. It’s a waste of valuable space in a subject line.

Create Your Content Now: A successful holiday email strategy is only as effective as its execution. Don’t let vacationing co-workers, holiday parties, or the general lack of focus at the office prevent you from sending campaigns on time.

Develop a content calendar that includes hard deadlines for content. Last-minute scrambles to send email campaigns can derail an otherwise perfect plan.